The last decade has seen increasing integration of communication protocols and techniques into common platforms. The platforms have been miniaturized. Personal Digital Assistants are not only cellular communication capable but also instant messaging, email, and web browsing capable. Laptops and personal computers now have softphone applications to simulate and enable circuit-switched-quality voice telecommunications.
Against this backdrop of technical advance and integration, development of the digital telephone has remained relatively static. While digital phones have been upgraded with faster processors, they have failed to keep pace with nearby desktop appliances, such as laptops and personal computers. The computer, for instance, represents a vast repository of information that is relevant to the user's telephone experience. Without linkage, it remains for the user to access and find the information while maintaining a real-time voice conversation. Servers too contain a vast repository of information that is relevant to the user's telephone experience. At the present time, there is no overall application or linked store that can source information to a user's telephone device to provide contact information and/or related documents.
Further, as applications move forward, they become larger and more complex in order to provide the features that users desire. It is not uncommon for an enterprise application to require millions of lines of code to effectuate. With that complexity, periodic updates are required to fix bugs or simply to upgrade functionality. The updates need to be downloaded to an individual telephone.
Finally, the multitude of telephones, telephone systems, and computer hardware that exists today in the business world makes it difficult, if not impossible, for application developers to support all of the available platforms with their products.
The challenge then is to find a solution to the above-stated problems that links the available resources to make a user more productive, while ensuring that more complex applications do not bog down the telephony device so as to take away from its primary purpose.